Watched The Raid on Amazon instant, so quiet!!!

Dr. Frenchenstein

So The Raid came out yesterday (It is awesome, if you like action/kung fu/violence, go see it) and i decided to use an Amazon On Demand credit and watch it through my playstation 3. The video was fine, but i could not hear the voices at all, unless they were yelling. Sound effects were fine, punches landing, gunshots, explosions, etc. I couldn't find any way to adjust the sound though. I have a 57" HD LCD, HDMI hookup to PS3, and i just use TV speakers as i don't have a sound system. Has anyone used it AOD through their PS3, and had the same issue? It wasn't a big deal thanks to subtitles, but i'm not going to waste money renting a movie from Amazon, if i can't hear any talking.

I remember someone mentioning in a A/V thread on here, that you need to switch to a different audio track when watching certain blu rays using just the TV speakers to avoid a similar issue. i'm assuming it's the same type of sound problem here? like it's streaming in 5.1, but i need 2ch? (my terminology may be off there...)

Pantshandshake

Not getting voices, but getting all the other sounds, absolutely sounds like it was streaming in a different format than what you were... well, not displaying, I guess. Listening to? That said, I've had similar issues with Amazon On Demand, though on different devices. Never could fix it.

As a semi aside, I saw The Raid in a theater. It was fantastic.

bowen

So... are you totally not ready to burn your haunted house down yet?

MushroomStick

Make sure the audio setting on your ps3 is set to some sort of 2 channel stereo setting. If you just let it auto detect, it might have picked some kind of surround sound that you don't have speakers for. I guess then check and see if the amazon on demand app has any audio settings to play with.

Pantshandshake

bowen wrote: »

So... are you totally not ready to burn your haunted house down yet?

God, thank you. I didn't want to bring this up. Mister Doctor, burn down that house. Come live with me, a complete stranger. It will anger my wife greatly (a plus.) And we can watch The Raid EVERY DAY.

Essee

If it's not an audio setting issue, my last couple TVs had a "Speech" preset for audio that could sometimes make a huge difference in terms of being able to understand what was being said, so you could give that a shot if your TV has a similar preset. Or fool around with your audio settings in a similar fashion (I think the Speech preset ups high-pitched audio/treble and lowers low-pitched audio/bass a bit because it tends to sound a bit tinny for music).

Lorek

You might also want to look into any dynamic range compression settings you have. When my blu-ray player is set to auto, some videos do that same thing with the quiet voices and the normal everything else.

Cabezone

Most of the speech in 5.1 soundtracks comes through the center channel. When you pump 5.1 into a stereo setup it sounds exactly like what you are describing. Try to see if your PS3 is outputting 5.1 to your television, look for a audio setting and set it to stereo in options.

Dr. Frenchenstein

So it could be my PS3, and not Amazon. Cool, i will check that out tonight.

For once this issue has nothing to do with my house!

bowen

Dr. Frenchenstein wrote: »

So it could be my PS3, and not Amazon. Cool, i will check that out tonight.

For once this issue has nothing to do with my house!

bowen

Though to add some real help here for you Dr.F -- it's likely the whole "surround sound" setup your PS3 is trying to auto-detect with normal stereo speakers. I get this really bad on some movies if I don't enforce stereo with some combination PS3/TV settings.

FANTOMAS

You should look into what "version" of the video you are watching, what you described sounds exactly like theater sound configuration, wich uses a much wider range of sound volumes for dramatic purposes, usually leaving the speech at a way lower volume and isolated from other ambiance sound, while giving a lot more power during dramatic/action scenes. I would say you check this before doing anything with your sound configurations, specially if other movies or videos you have have a more balanced sound (TV audio vs. Cinema audio)

Steev

Yeah, I let my PS3 determine my audio settings and didn't think much about it until one of my games really made good use of a 5.1 speaker setup I didn't have. That's when I looked at my audio settings and quickly switched it to a 2-speaker setup.

Dr. Frenchenstein

The only "versions" i saw were SD and HD, i did the HD.